Two of my favourite French cultural icons are being brought together with an exhibition of Asterix and friends at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The show, appropriately, is being housed in the museum’s frigidarium, a part of the building that has survived since the Romans ran Gaul.
In the typically irreverent style of Asterix’s creators Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny, the show features some great cartoon parodies of classic artworks. I love this version of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV -
And here is their take on Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, with a fish (what, no roast boar?!) standing in for the human corpse -
It’s interesting to hear how Uderzo and Goscinny incorporated historical research into their artistic process. The exhibition’s curator Emmanuelle Héran says that ‘while neither spoke Latin (they relied on dictionaries for quotations) and weren’t experts on Roman or Gaulish history, they did plenty of school-book research. The exhibition shows them devouring Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and you can see notes Goscinny scribbled in biro on pieces of exercise book paper as preparation for Asterix and the Olympic Games. “No pine trees, cypresses” […] “From 776 B.C. the Games are held for 5 days between the end of June and the first days of September”’.
Apparently, historians were sometimes distressed by their gleeful anachronisms. (I can just imagine the kind of wizened carrot-up-his-bum scholar that would take issue with Asterix. It’s a cartoon, people.) Luckily, Goscinny and Uderzo were more interested in having a laugh than providing accurate depictions of the past. Otherwise, we might never have witnessed the joyous concurrence of a 16th century square-rigged pirate ship and a Viking longboat.
Strangely, while I enjoy reading the Asterix cartoons in French, I think they’re actually funnier in English. I don’t know, maybe the English language is more suited to puns and word play. For instance, the drug reference makes Getafix a much wittier name for a druidic pharmacologist than the original Panoramix. And isn't Cacophonix a more suitable moniker for the no-talent Bard than the French Assurancetourix (which sounds like rental car insurance)?
In French class last term, my classmates and I could get away with drinking wine and waffling about movies, rugby and what we did over the weekend. This term, we have to read French novels and come to class prepared with lots of intelligent things to say about them whilst exhibiting the ability to ‘think in French’. At the moment, I’m leavening my reading of Les Liaisons Dangereuses with liberal doses of Asterix en Hispanie (but don’t tell my teacher).
Check this out. It’s a Wordle, a graphical representation of this blog showing which words get used the most and relative relationships between different terms. You can basically consider it as a picture of what may be going on inside my brain at any given moment (or at least the stuff that’s fit for public consumption).
I like the quirkily appropriate way some of the associations are working here. Note, for example, the bundle ‘political violence state’ in the upper left quadrant, and at bottom left, ‘Christians bad’ (this is how I felt when the door-to-door Catholics recently came calling while I was studying for my final exam). At top right, we have ‘analysis pain’ and ‘connect better’, which I could read as either a set of instructions to myself or a whimper of despair, depending on how my research is going. And in the middle, the ‘Times Muslims experience’ sounds like I’m advertising an odd sort of son-et-lumière show.
I might try this out on some of my corporate clients. It would be a great way of hammering home the point I’m always trying to make, which is that they spend way, WAY too much time talking about themselves.
When I posted recently on the use of scold’s bridle in early modern England, a number of you commented that you felt as chilled as I did when contemplating the role these devices played in the brutal enforcement of gender and class order. Several of you also mentioned you had seen these devices in museums in the UK and Europe, and that set me off on another train of thought.
On the one hand, it’s essential that museums, as educators and interpreters of public history, tell the full story about the past even when it’s unpalatable for the tourists. But on the other hand, I can’t help but be disturbed by the gruesome voyeurism and the titillation that is sometimes enabled (and even promoted) by museums. It seems that as cash-strapped museums struggle to make themselves more appealing to the tourists, the temptation to go for the sensational in the quest to make a buck may just be getting to be too much for some of them.
Something like the London Dungeon is probably an extreme example that, judging by the way it promotes itself, happily blurs the line between museum and ghoulish entertainment. The Dungeon urges schools to “Put aside the textbooks, bring the past to life and give your class a history lesson to remember with a visit to the Dungeons! … Our teams of live actors blend carefully researched historical fact with outstanding special effects to provide your class with an exciting, educational and unforgettable journey into the depths of history that is, above all, seriously scary fun!” Not only that, but with the Dungeons Resource Pack, teachers can “Take history's horrible bits back to your classroom and allow your pupils to build on their new found knowledge and enthusiasm. …Combine the Dungeons' usual dose of interactive fun and gore with national curriculum topics of study.”
The London Dungeon’s shtick promotes a vicarious experience of London’s ‘dark underbelly’, complete with the usual relish in displaying medieval instruments of torture and recounting the ‘fun history’ of sexual sadists like Jack the Ripper*. As another example, the organisers of this major touring exhibition of historical torture devices don’t baulk at promoting the titillation factor, promising, “Students too, will have the chance to satisfy their curiosity on … Tortura’s more flashy and fleshy attraction.” Can you imagine if this same sensibility - or rather lack of it - was applied to museum representations of more recent history? Say, Cambodia’s Killing Fields or Srebrenica? No? So why does it seem perfectly acceptable to make slick ‘multimedia entertainment’ out of it just because the victims and perpetrators lived in the ‘distant’ past?
I hate seeing topics like the European witchcraft persecutions and the Inquisition treated in ways that cynically exploit our seemingly insatiable desire for images of violence and torture as entertainment (images that are often sexualised in highly problematic ways)**. I certainly don’t believe museums should avoid or sanitise topics like this. But whether they succeed in making people think more deeply - both about the past and the present - or merely give passive viewers a cheap thrill depends very much on how things are presented. Put into their wider social, political and cultural context, such subjects can be powerful prompts to question the forces that shape individual lives and wider society, both historically and in our own time. But too often, these types of exhibits never rise above gratuitous displays of torture implements, presented shorn of all context and achieving little but to elicit gasps of voyeuristic horror.
As museums begin to utilise new technologies to make their exhibits more interactive and engaging (read, more effective at competing for the tourist dollar), I think this is going to become a much more sensitive issue. When you replace dusty old glass cases and typewritten index cards with fully sensory, 3D experiences, the line between education and entertainment is bound to get even more blurred. I think that is going to make it even trickier for museums to deal appropriately with the dark side of history.
** As an aside, Judith Walkowitz’s The City of Dreadful Delightdoes a fine job of locating the Jack the Ripper episode within its much broader and more complex historical and cultural context of class conflict, sexual politics, racism and the role of the media in Victorian England. It’s a scholarly work (careful footnoting of sources, full bibliography etc.) but Walkowitz’s clear and dynamic writing style also makes it very readable for the layperson.
** Do a Google image search on ‘inquisition museum’. I rest my case.
Gather round the fire and turn out the lights, for it’s time to share tales of the spooky, strange and unexpected in this Halloween edition of ancient/medieval Carnivalesque…
And speaking of vampires, if you’re after a nice sharp wooden stake… You could do worse than check out the Anglo-Saxon wooden architecture discussed here. Using the example of a surviving 12thC stave-church in Norway, Carla Nayland makes the important point that we might need to use a bit more imagination envisioning the upperworks of Anglo-Saxon wooden buildings. (Bonus - Carla includes a stunning photo of said Norwegian church.)
From The New York Times comes one of the few half-decent analyses of a recent study showing that women are less happy than men and that our unhappiness has been steadily increasing since the 1970s. It may be no surprise to you to hear that conservative pundits are gleefully using said study to ‘prove’ women are unhappier because of feminism. No indeed, it’s not that we’re unhappy because we still have to put up with crap like this. It’s because getting the vote has cruelly raised our expectations beyond our capabilities, and now we aspire to ridiculous things like having fair access to education and equal pay for equal work. If we’d just heed biology’s dictates and go back to having babies and keeping house like we’re designed to, we’d all be blissful. This subject would usually trigger a great long rant from me, but luckily for you I have a final exam to get to (Advanced Historiography - one question, three hours – should be fun). So instead, I’ll leave you to enjoy this documentary, er, I mean, comedy gem.
(For Ginger, to whom I promised anatomical drawings.) Over the last couple of months, I’ve been following the various discourses swirling around the case of South African athlete Caster Semenya with some interest. The tragedy of her situation makes me wonder whether medieval concepts of sex and gender could offer us an opening to ways of conceptualising biological sex that are more holistic (and realistic) than the strictly male/female binary into which we keep trying to rigidly divide the entire human species in all its marvellous variety and diversity.
Medieval mentalities were coloured by incredibly complex and nuanced perceptions of sexuality, gender and the body*. According to medieval medical theory**, physical sex was not an immutable oppositional binary grounded in biological difference; in fact, one’s biological sex was a very slippery and unstable state indeed. Humoral medicine held that all humans started with a common set of male reproductive organs (the male being the generative first principle). A favourable combination of hotter and drier humors resulted in the penis and testicles becoming fully formed (and reaching a state of perfection) external to the body – et voila, you have a male baby. By contrast, females were the result of a kind of under-cooking in utero, with a combination of less favourable cool and humid humors creating an imperfect internal construction of the penis and testicles as womb and ovaries.
Medical texts and anatomy illustrations from the period*** reflect this conception of the female as inverted (and therefore imperfect) male. At top left is an illustration from a 1523 anatomy by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi. It shows the female reproductive system, but the schematic and labelling clearly indicates it is based on a male model. And below is a beautifully detailed illustration of the female generative organs from the famous 1543 De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius. The resemblance to a male penis is marked (right down to a certain suggestion of hairiness).
The fortuitous combination of hot and dry humors that created male physical sex was also believed to produce such superior masculine characteristics as strength, reason, continence and a bent for action. By contrast, cool, damp humors rendered women passive, weak and ruled by emotion or passion rather than reason. Women were also characterised as more lustful and sexually disordered than men, and medieval commentators speculated this was the result of a constant yearning by women to heat themselves up.
Sex as continuum instead of opposition
Within this worldview, physical sex was conceived of as a continuum that may have had ‘clearly male’ and ‘clearly female’ marked at each end, but where there could be slippage between a whole range of men-women and women-men in between. For example, the lactating Christ-as-mother figure, a popular motif of late medieval piety, blurred the boundaries between male and female just as it did between human and god.
With no clearly determined biological binary of male or female sex, sexual difference was grounded in a masculine/feminine gender dichotomy, and it was the individual’s social role, behaviour and character that defined, and could potentially even alter, their physical sex. A trope that appears in the fabliaux of late medieval France is that of the female who presents as male – adopting male clothing and exhibiting such masculine attributes as boisterousness and physical prowess – and in the denouement, has a penis spontaneously spring from her body.
Virago as a strategic performance of gender
In a subtler act of gender-bending, ‘lordly women’ could adopt the self-representation of virago (derived from ‘virgin’, which was also a much more ambiguous state in medieval thinking than it is today). As virago, they overcame to varying degrees their innate female weaknesses in order to lay claim to the masculine virtues of reason, strength and continence that made them fit to wield power. Magistra et Mater recently posted about Kimberly LoPrete’s work on perceptions of ‘lordly women’ in the high Middle Ages. It’s interesting to consider whether they were seen simply as unusually competent women filling a masculine role, or whether they actually became gendered as masculine. A third possibility may be that they occupied an indeterminate position, taking on some aspects of maleness but in other ways remaining female (and this position may have shifted towards more or less masculinity/femininity depending on the context and circumstances).
Gender as the starting point for sex
In medieval thought, then, it was gender – the social and cultural role and behaviour of the individual – that was the starting point for determining physical sex and not the other way around. For those of us living now, there are some obvious problems with this model, with the privileging of the male as first principle being the most glaring. But on the other hand, the fluidity and mutability of medieval conceptualisations of sex seem to me to offer some potential avenues to thinking about sex and gender that could relax our grip on a reductionist and repressive biological opposition. It occurs to me that by questioning the definitions and the limits of this ‘self-evident’ and ‘natural’ binary, what I’m really seeking is to foster some dialogue between the premodern and the postmodern that will eventually enable us to comprehend and accept the rich heterogeneity of the human species.
* For more on this, see for starters the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, Karma Lochrie, Joan Cadden, Thomas Laqueur, Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset.
** When I say ‘medieval’ here, I’m talking about the eleventh century re-discovery of Galen and the translation of Arabic texts such as Avicenna’s Canon into Latin
*** The two examples here are from early 16thC printed anatomies, but the illustrations are consistent with those in much older manuscripts. Berengario, for example, was heavily influenced by the texts of Mondino dei Luzzi (d. 1326).
Image credits: Jacopo Berengario da Carpi Isagogae breues, perlucidae ac uberrimae, in anatomiam humani corporis a communi medicorum academia usitatam. (Bologna: Beneditcus Hector, 1523). NIH National Library of Medicine
Andreas Vesalius De humani corporis fabrica. (Basel: Oporinus, 1543). Wellcome Library
Incidentally, the Wellcome Library has a fantastic store of historical and contemporary images online in categories including illness and wellness, nature, culture and war. They're freely available for download for personal, academic teaching or study use. (Why didn’t they have cool stuff like this when I was at school??)
The All Hallows Eve ancient/medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted here at Bavardess on October 31.
There’s still time to nominate your favourite ancient/medieval posts from September and October by completing the form here, or by emailing me directly on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.
And thanks to everyone who’s already sent in nominations - they’ve led me to discover some interesting new blogs this month!
Corporate PR flack by day, grad student by night. Aficionado of wine, cheese and a good argument at any time. I'm studying history and have a particular interest in late medieval/early modern Europe, and I make a crust on the side as a corporate communications and marketing contractor.
Email me on bavardess AT gmail DOT com.
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